This blog highlights how applications built around DWF can do more than what can be done just using paper. The blog covers the building (architectural/electrical/construction), manufacturing, and infrastructure (e.g., GIS, telecommunications) industries.

April 14, 2006

Vespa works on DWF files too!

Shaan Hurley has a great Between the Lines blog entry for a new project known as Vespa. Senior Architect, Brian Mathews, mentioned that Vespa this fits right into the DWF workflow. Vespa and DWF demonstrate the idea of leveraging rich metadata to improve the workflow beyond what "TIFF" or "PDF" can do. For example, many people use Adobe Illustrator® to take engineering drawings and give them an artistic rendered view; however this is a very manual process: each drawing is imported and then hand tweaked to get the right visual.

Vespa takes a different approach. Rather than having you spend lots of time re-illustrating your CAD drawings, Vespa allows you to define style templates. You then apply these templates to your designs based on object definitions. Since a DWF captures rich object definitions and layer settings from your CAD data, Vespa can apply different style templates to different object categories automatically. This can be done with a DWF! This allows Vespa to instantly apply an artistic style or set of styles to your DWF files without manual "illustration": each object gets the appropriate coloring, texturing, shadows, and penning style you assign to that category of object. Imagine being able to apply these templates to hundreds of CAD drawings, or being able to try dozens of color schemes on the same CAD drawing with a click. Imagine doing this right in front of your client. I know I have said that DWF goes beyond the paper - but this is way beyond.

An image like the one above is generated with no work. You simply use Vespa to apply a visual style to the DWF file.